Graduating from Burning Man to a 9 acre, 5-family community. What does it take?

We started off as veteran Burning Man friends and we ended up as neighbors, chosen family members, business partners, co-parents and partners in the process of life. Little did we know that there was a grand design at work when years before, many of us came together to do a deep dive into a profound spiritual work. With the aid of a trusted guide and teacher, we witnessed each other shed layers of fear, persona and ego. It was gritty, gut wrenching, and sometimes, very entertaining.

Community coming together to celebrate!

Through this process, we were willing to let go of the comfortable, yet limiting, disconnected lives we were living and were able to get honest about our lives and where we really wanted to be living: in a communal village where we could raise humans into integral beings. Many of us held the vision of community in various iterations for quite some time and had organized meetings and facilitated discussions around how this could actually come about in a place as independent and narcissistic as Southern California.

What we learned is that it wasn’t enough to gather people against something like “The Man” or “Capitalism”. We had to unite for higher values we believed in, while being guided by heart based wisdom, service, integrity, unconditional love, collaboration, and childlike play. It wasn’t even enough to agree on a set of values; we came together because we were already in the process of living those values. From there, it was almost as if we were chosen by invisible forces to cultivate ourselves, our children, our relationships, and the earth. We had little to no blueprint of how to go about this behemoth task, so we called upon our collective skill set to find our way in the dark, guided mostly by faith and trust.

“The Nest” a handmade structure that we crafted for one of our first events here- we hold sacred fires and circles here.

Our village was born with a diverse group with backgrounds in construction, education, permaculture, property management, real estate, performance art, furniture design, acupuncture, psychology and the armed forces. It involved long meetings that asked us to deepen our frustration tolerance, find levity and ultimately, chose love.